Our Authentication & Quality Assurance Procedure For Creating Fedora Installation Media

Below is our authentication & quality assurance procedure for creating Fedora installation media:

# Download Fedora

wget https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/42/Workstat...

2025-09-22 23:04:29 (48.1 MB/s) - ‘Fedora-Workstation-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso’ saved [2398523392/2398523392]

# First, import Fedora's GPG key(s)

curl -O https://fedoraproject.org/fedora.gpg

# Download the Fedora x86_64 (iso) CHECKSUM

wget https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/42/Workstat...

# Now, verify that the CHECKSUM file is valid

gpgv --keyring ./fedora.gpg ./Fedora-Workstation-42-1.1-x86_64-CHECKSUM

gpgv: Signature made Fri 11 Apr 2025 07:29:41 AM EDT
gpgv: using RSA key B0F4950458F69E1150C6C5EDC8AC4916105EF944
gpgv: Good signature from "Fedora (42) "

Note: The important bit to look for is that it says it's got a good signature from the Fedora developers

# Lastly, check that your download's checksum matches:

sha256sum -c *-CHECKSUM

# If all went well you should get a line that says OK next to the file name of the ISO image

Fedora-Workstation-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso: OK

# Plug in a USB flash drive and unmount any auto-mounted partitions to ensure reliability of written image
# At a minimum make sure the size of the flash drive matches what you inserted to avoid accidentally
# overwriting important data

sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 59.75 GiB, 64160400896 bytes, 125313283 sectors
Disk model: Flash Drive
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 128 125313250 125313123 59.8G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

# So we're going to run the follow commands as the flash drive above we are using has mounted partitions

sudo umount /dev/sda1

# Write the Fedora ISO image to disk

sudo dd if=Fedora-Workstation-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso of=/dev/sda bs=16M oflag=direct status=progress

# Run the sync command to flush any data to disk and make sure it's written

sync

# Identify the size of the ISO image using the stat command

stat -c '%s' Fedora-Workstation-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso

2398523392

# Along with the above number output use the head command to check the portion of the disk we've written
# the ISO to Prior to running this command it isn't a bad idea to unplug the USB drive and connect it again

sudo head -c 2398523392 /dev/sda | sha256sum

# Make sure the output above matches what is in the Fedora-Workstation-x-x.x-x86_64-CHECKSUM file we downloaded earlier

cat *-CHECKSUM | grep SHA256

SHA256 (Fedora-Workstation-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso) = 98958d80e8a80eabe61275337f969c8e2212adc3a223d9bbdab9411bb1c95cba

# In this case the above matches so we can conclude that the ISO image is fully and properly written to disk-